Thomson

It’s a heck of a way to run a pre-election campaign. On the eve of an expected election, politicians usually spend their time playing up good news, downplaying the bad, shaking hands and kissing babies.

Vaccination

NEW YORK, N.Y. - Certain that they are right, struggling to find ways to get their message across, public health officials are exasperated by their inability to convince more U.S. parents to vaccinate their children.

Celebrities may have cornered the market on unconventional baby names like Blue Ivy and North West, but a Swiss branding company is offering help to parents seeking unique monikers for newborns — for a significant price.

Only two days after her first chemotherapy session, Laura Roberts was already feeling the side effects. In some sense, it felt like a bad flu: aches and pains all over, but also a red flush down her arms and extensive bloating that made her legs feel like two huge heavy weights dragging her down. The tops of her feet were sensitive to the touch and she had sharp pain in her left breast, where surgeons had performed a lumpectomy Nov. 27 to take out a Stage-3 tumour. They later determined they hadn’t taken out enough diseased tissue.

When Mirene Paladines Sanchez and Geoff Hawryluk got engaged, they talked about two different possible locations for their wedding. So they got married in both: First, in a church ceremony in Guayaquil, Ecuador, where Mirene (pronounced mee-reh-nay) is originally from and most of her family still lives, then the following year in Geoff’s parents’ backyard in Sherwood Park.

Vickie Laliotis hits some of our city’s best bashes to snap photos for our weekly Social Seen column. She is an Edmonton-based fashion writer and the founder of popular style blog adventuresinfashion.ca. Email Vickie your event suggestions at arts&life@edmontonjournal.com or tweet her at Fumbling Towards Ecstasy

Culinary tourism is the travel soup du jour, one of the fastest-growing segments in the business, reports the Travel Industry Association of America. On the eve of Northern Lands, a food and beverage festival March 27-28 that will put Edmonton in the culinary spotlight, it’s timely to consider our food scene and how others will view it. Edmonton is enjoying “a culinary renaissance,” says wine merchant and columnist Gurvinder Bhatia, who is founder and director of the Northern Lands festival. “There has been a significant evolution in food culture here in the last five years,” he says. It follows a fallow period of more than a decade, says Bhatia, “where restaurant culture devolved into one not based on quality.” Compared to an earlier golden age of restaurants such as Il Portico and Jack’s Grill, “we lost the culture of service,” says Bhatia.

Carl Honoré has been called the world’s leading evangelist, global guru and unofficial godfather of the Slow Movement, which advocates living life slower, even embracing boredom rather than the cult of busyness.

Newwest Travel and the Edmonton Journal take off for Europe and a high-calorie, eight-night tour of Amsterdam on May 5. The trip is timed to coincide with the inaugural KLM direct flight linking Edmonton and Amsterdam, to run three times a week (four in the summer). The Newwest package offers food explorers numerous opportunities to get to know Amsterdam through its cafes, cheesemongers, brewers, and markets. As someone who has never been to Amsterdam, I’m particularly excited to visit some of the storied food destinations, such as the Alkmaar Cheese Market, just outside of Amsterdam, where cheese has been traded on Waagplein Square since 1365.

Relationships

All together now: All you need is love. Love is all you need. It seems like such a simple recommendation, and yet it can be awfully hard to find this essential component of a happy and fulfilling life.

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Theresa McManus Birders from near and far are able to cross an item off their bucket list after viewing a wee bird that lost its way. A red-flanked bluetail that would normally be in Southeast Asia at this time of [...]